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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

This article is quite interesting, but I don't think it's particularly applicable to COVID-19. COVID-19 doesn't kill the vast majority of the people it infects, and when it does, it happens several weeks later, when they aren't spreading the virus anyway.

And while the vaccines are "leaky", they appear to make people much less likely to spread the virus, not more.

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The point is that a virus is a brute-force mechanism. This introduces a probability (even a low one) that a virus might "choose" to become more nasty in order to elicit a response from a "vaccinated" population.

Vaccinated is in quotes because many of the current vaccines are, admittedly, therapeutics rather than vaccines. The classical definition of a vaccine is something that prevents infection entirely. The current politicized definition of vaccine is something that decreases mortality / symptoms for a specific disease.

We know that these vaccines are "leaky", and now it's just up to random chance to determine whether or not this will lead to a scenario like the chickens. I believe the chance is very low, but it's there.

Where did you get that definition of a vaccine?

Few vaccines, historically, worked perfectly.

From the article:

> It’s important to note childhood vaccines for polio, measles, mumps, rubella and smallpox aren’t leaky; they are considered “perfect” vaccines.

Some vaccines (including those) are basically perfect, but they're a minority. It also doesn't logically follow that anything which isn't perfect isn't a vaccine.

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